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11 November 2009

Apple-Butter and Cheese

I'm from the south of Holland. This means that, through the ages of our existence, we got a lot of unexpected visitors showing up. Further up north it was far too wet and chilly for most of them, so they used to camp out in our neck of the woods.

First the Romans, then the Spanish (boy, did they stay long...), and, of course, (a couple of times): The French. Now, this was all a long time ago, but it did leave some traces. The one I want to particularly mention in this blog-post is: Food.

We, the natives from Brabant and Limburg, we love our food. We take every opportunity to add a bit of southern life style to the simple, sturdy Dutch kitchen. We are professionals when it comes to beer brewing and baking fruit pies, our soil produces delicious asparagus, and I think we invented the apple-butter and cheese sandwich (What? You don't know the apple-butter and cheese sandwich?).Of course this does mean that we were always too busy cooking and eating to really join in with northern Holland's golden age, and I happen to be a real Southerner. This means I have quite a sizeable collection of inherited, home-grown, torn-out-of-magazines, and adapted recipes. All on scraps of paper, stained and scribbled over, torn and wrinkled at the edges. Take the soufflé with warm cherries, the wild boar stew, that casserole of confit with white beans, the delicious spinach malfatti, those clams-in-a-package....hmmm...nothing you'd throw away, right?Anyway, I got to learn to know Kornelia Székessy, who saved me and my messy recipe collection. She got some of my ribbon, and then made something very handy. And beautiful (I love her little hand stamped tabs).

So here I am, straightening out all those scraps of paper. Writing things down properly. Bringing this binder to life.

If you like the idea, have a look on my site. There is some fine bookbinder work on there since last week, and it's not only for recipes ;)